Virtual: Perceiving the real world as virtual

By Abhay Singh

What if the real world could feel virtual-and you'd never know the difference?

Dax Kestrel built ELSE to make reality bearable. The technology is elegant: a device that gently modulates your
perception, making faces kinder, mornings brighter, the world finally enough. When his company launches ELSE: Home
to millions, he believes he's delivered civic kindness.

Keir Quell helped invent the science, then walked away. Now he's released the Else Patch-a counter-practice
teaching people to see reality's constructed nature without any device. He promises freedom through perception
alone.

But when a woman dies testing Keir's method in traffic, the city fractures between those who want safety through
control and those who demand the right to choose what they see.

Marin Hartwright, ethics lead at Veldt Corporation, faces an impossible decision: Deploy the Hard Render and lock
perception into corporate stability, or greenlight the Commons Kernel-a radical experiment letting communities
negotiate their own reality.

As infrastructure destabilizes and consensus fragments, a simple question emerges: Who decides what you perceive?

In a world where perception is programmable, where does reality end and rendering begin? And when the boundary
dissolves completely, what happens to truth, trust, and the capacity to care?

VIRTUAL is a philosophical thriller about the technology of perception, the politics of consensus, and the fine
line between enhancing reality and replacing it. For readers who loved the mind-bending concepts of Inception, the
technological speculation of Black Mirror, and the existential questions of Westworld.

Your brain already renders reality. The question is: who controls the renderer?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FZ95CB3T
• ISBN13: 9798272730916
• Release Date: November 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"